Flashback…

Facebook just gave me a reminder of our progress… we may not be the fastest renovation in the world, but we’ve got a lot done over the years, working part-time and learning as we go!

Here are a few photos from 9 years ago – excuse the quality! At this stage we were just starting to renovate the old part of our house, to make our guest rooms. Now that part’s all done, and we’re of course heavy into the stable conversion to the brewery.

The old part of the house is about 3-400 years old, and they used to live upstairs with the cattle below to keep them warm in winter. The entrance was by an outside staircase on the north side of the house, and the cattle came in on the ground floor, south side. When they extended to the “modern” house in the 1920’s, they demolished the staircase and used the treads as lintels for the windows in the new building. Now we’ve reinstated those outside stairs in the original place, for the private access and balcony of our middle guest room. We needed a staircase on the inside also of course, so the walk-in chimney is what we were attacking to start the project.

Grampy Bill’s recreation of the old outside staircase

The oak came from our local saw mill, conveniently located about 2 km away in our village. The design calculations came from the internet. The success came from VERY careful and painstaking measurements! For the preceding 20 years we’d had the staircase coming up from the kitchen, but we needed space in there, and moving it to the entrance hall kept the guest part of the house separate from our private rooms upstairs.